Conjecture

A large collective's intelligence cannot be tested; it has to be read from what the collective does, across many different goals and over time. Malone's tests work for groups of up to about 40 people. For companies, markets and democracies he points to persistence instead: GE surviving in the Dow since 1896, or 61% of top-fifth plants still in the top fifth five years later. So a collective that wants to know whether it is getting smarter needs a durable record of its calls on many kinds of question, kept as it goes, because there is no test it can sit afterwards.

Collective intelligence